


In Which Mrs. Strife, Newly Widowed, Fixes What She Can

by RainofLittleFishes



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: A Mother's Love is Fierce, Alternative Univese, Everything is Beautiful and Nothing Hurts, Fix-It, Implied Human Experimentation, Mama Strife Lives, Off-screen death, The Most Effective Weapon in Gaia is Not What You Think It Would Be, The other trouserleg of time, food is love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-27
Updated: 2014-06-27
Packaged: 2018-02-06 11:46:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1856892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainofLittleFishes/pseuds/RainofLittleFishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mrs. Strife fixes, well, not everything, but what she can. ShinRa is not so self-observant as to notice. The Energy Crisis is not resolved, but will somehow be fixed at some future point. Cloud Strife won't have to go back in time in this 'verse. Turks have a terrible sense of humor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Which Mrs. Strife, Newly Widowed, Fixes What She Can

**In Which Mrs. Strife, Newly Widowed, Fixes What She Can**

The first thing, though not the important thing, was that Mrs. Gruber took a bad fall. Mr. Gruber, while being adept at general maintenance, pouring beer, and steady contributions to the Nibelheim rumor mill, was a rather dismal cook. At the tail of winter, three months’ steady diet of burned soup, lumpy porridge, and ill-humored company were a burning stone of discontent at the town’s only gathering place. Mrs. Gruber’s sister, once tarnished by the treacherous act of having married away, was redeemed by her recent ascension to the status of widow while maintaining her status as a competent, though uninspired, mistress of the kitchen.

Mrs. Strife, also recently widowed, and also competent in the hearth arts, but not well regarded in Nibelheim due to the appalling act of being a foreigner, took the opportunity to pack up her son, her mending kit, her best frying pan, and her rifle, sell the small but well-built house at below market value, and move, like so many immigrants of the new age, to Midgar.

Please do not forget the frying pan.

Mrs. Strife had a lovely face and was built tiny. She had a mother’s empathy, and though quiet among strangers, was happiest where she could do the most to help. Nibelheim had been full of strangers.

Anika Strife also had a will of iron, a four year old who still dictated letters to a daddy that wasn’t coming home, and a mother dragon’s tenacity over her last treasure.

*

Cadets mostly lived from one misery to the next.

Some were the personal misery of heaving breath and dry throat on a long run with weighted packs, some were the public misery or schadenfreude of drill sergeant dress downs, and some were the savored miseries of complaining over rushed and disgusting meals in the cafeteria.

The last, the most frequent and least supervised, though brief, period of socialization among the mob of potential future Soldiers, Turks, and general army cannon fodder, heaving their awkward way through puberty and a gauntlet of tests less designed to result in the best professionals then to winnow through for the easiest, cheapest results for the Company, generally featured a round of “guess what’s in the Mystery Meat”.

Professor Hojo, had he ever bothered to listen to general sentiments instead of capricious scientific whimsy or the voices in his head, might have noted that lab experiments, even failed ones, were far too valuable to waste on creating Mystery Meat. (As this might have led him to wonder what effects he could engender in the always abundant ranks of low-level grunts by the vector of the mass meals, it is just as well that no one mentioned it to him.)

This, it may be noted by future students of the intertwined history of Midgar and ShinRa, was similar to the PR posting WacDonald’s provided citizens in regards to allegations of Malboro or Midgar Zollom substitutions for the Retired Racer Chocobo Burger. The economics of such substitutions were not the source of either the anxiety or its relief. Urban legends, like gossip, thrived in the face of both adversity and privileged wealth.

The kitchen in the cafeteria of ShinRa had once been of modern design and the highest caliber of efficiency. The staff, once well trained and alert under the vigilant lone eye of a former Specialist, had long since suffered attrition and apathy and had, until recently, been composed of two remaining individuals whose primary duties were opening cans, pre-scooping trays, and supervising the current batch of cadets on KP punishment detail. The only “fresh” food served now was the last season’s potatoes, reserved for the sole purpose of inflicting hours of dull knives and slightly shriveled potatoes on cadets in trouble.

The Mystery Meat, arriving in 40 lbs cans from a cut-rate third party supplier and differentiated only by several middling shades of brown and three types of texture (squishy, lumpy, or watch-your-teeth), was of both unknown origin and era.

The industrial grade mixer installed in pride of place by the back wall with a good view of the rest of the kitchen, and once fondly christened “Lefty” by a one-armed, since passed, retired Specialist, went unused and unoiled. The cutting boards were shoved in unopened cabinets except for one that ended up shoved under the serving bar to even a leg that was bent in the last rush for the last apple… the last time fresh fruit had been served to celebrate higher than expected quarterly returns. Since such a time the most popular offering had devolved to the mildly fruit-flavored scoop of gelatinous canned pie filling that occasionally made it into the budget when their supplier had a shipment too close to expiration.

It has been noted that the army marches on its stomach. No one could rightly accuse the shining stars of ShinRa’s Soldier Corps of being less than impressive, however, it may also be noted that the Corps was mostly comprised of young men with decent salaries, little downtime, and few long term prospects outside of the currently evolving Soldier experiment. It could also be noted that they ordered a positively staggering amount of takeout.

So, it happened that ShinRa, whether it acknowledged it or not, had a problem. And Mama Strife, newly itinerant, and with child in tow, was in need of both a place to stay and means to support herself. It is to both of their benefits that a series of people have let themselves like the young mother and son just enough to allow her ever closer access to the epicenter of the city. It is clear that they are new to the city – their dust is that of the plains, not soot, and few in the city would carry a back-holstered non-ShinRa issue hunting rifle instead of a sawed-off shotgun, concealed handgun, or blade.

It is a Sunday evening and on the train a charming young man in a dark blue suit makes eye contact. She smiles politely. He leans in and strikes up a conversation. They speak, in the hushed bubble of space that the crowd makes. When the train halts they are the last to leave, the crowd of cadets and young soldiers returning from leave, the night shift employees rushing to clock in. The young man saunters off, a levrikon among the chocobos.

Anika Strife politely bulldozes a nightshift clerk into confessing to the unannounced kitchen position, now an emergency as the last two workers left last week and cadets have been substituting since. Over twenty people are still in medical because two days ago the cadets only had green potatoes and didn’t have the authority to discard them. This too, ShinRa will never publicize.

In what would be an impressive display of efficiency should anyone have taken note, she completes her employment and liability waiver forms, receives her ID and access cards, and is surveying her new territory and resources in the wee hours of the morning, just four hours before the breakfast run begins. A few nights later she will receive assistance beyond what Cloud is able to render when she supervises the first of many punishment duties.

*

Nicky is mostly Wutaniese and for all that his family has lived under the plate since it was erected, the others still call him Ninja. Sometimes it’s said to hurt and sometimes it’s said with admiration. He’s determined to ignore both if necessary. He’s the oldest of six and since their mother died and his father started double shifts his siblings have all considered him the loud timepiece that regulates their days. At fourteen, his tiny cadet stipend goes straight back to them through the network of relatives that support each other with sometimes grudging love and duty. Here he’s known to be quiet.

Mrs. Strife is the first person at ShinRa to look at him without making him feel like she’s waiting for him to fail, or waiting for him to prove himself. Nick’s assigned kitchen duty with two others in his dorm. They started the fight. It didn’t so much as end as it was ended when the barracks head barreled in to investigate the noise. All three said that they fell off their bunks. The witnesses all concurred. They got 24 hours of kitchen duty for being hopeless enough to get black eyes from falling from the bottom bunks.

They started at midnight cleaning cabinets and doing a thorough inventory of what Mrs. Strife hasn’t managed to get to just yet. It’s 3 am now and she is still cheerful and soft voiced. Cloud Strife is curled up under a counter in the far corner of the kitchen on a mat of carpet and blanket. He’s the same size as Nick’s youngest sister and Nick is suddenly struck by the fact that there are no children on the plate and he hasn’t seen his family in two months. There are pots on the back wall stoves big enough for some of Nick’s middle siblings to bath in. The soft clatter of a pan lid on the stove turned low attests that they are in use. He can’t imagine how Mrs. Strife can lift them. She tells them to scrub up and gently teases Antoine that he should wash his bloodied nose as they aren’t yet that desperate for protein at breakfast. Antoine is not yet won over. Nick might be just a little bit infatuated.

The four of them spend two hours peeling, chopping, and playing search and destroy with the bad spots of a dozen cartons of mixed vegetables. Nick and Faren assault a small mountain of onions until they are both congested. Antoine looks like he’d like to be superior about it but the four of them have been talking and Mrs. Strife has been delicately drawing them into conversation about their families and homes and favorite dishes and he can’t quite work it in without looking bad and he can’t quite bring himself to not care what she might think. She excuses herself periodically to work several batches of dough. She explains that she was very excited to find a well behaved sourdough starter from one of the clerks on level eighteen. Nick has no idea what this means. Faren looks homesick.

They are all hungry by the time she starts to sauté the vegetables in batches by kind, explaining other uses for each type, asking if they’ve used them before and how. She passes stirring duties off to each of them until there are four burners going.

When she manages to convert several boxes of reconstituted eggs and half their hard won vegetables into scrambled omelets that are not only hot but smell surprisingly edible, they admit that there might be a perk to kitchen duty. Cloud is awake and watching them. Ten minutes before the cafeteria opens, the pans are all covered, first batch of trays lined up before the scoops, coffee perking. Some of the pots on the back stoves prove to hold slow cooked porridge and stew in progress for tonight’s dinner. It takes two of them to swing and carry each oatmeal pot to the serving section. Mrs. Strife plates up four generous helpings of eggs and oatmeal and a smaller fifth. She thanks them for their work. Ten minutes is more than enough time for them to bolt their food. It tastes better knowing what work has gone into it.

*

By 7am the industrial dishwasher is digesting a line of pans, trays, and forks and they are cleaning the cafeteria. Cloud helps, darting under and around the tables to pick up the biggest messes before the rags or mops can spread them around. By 7:45am the tables are gleaming sullenly and the three cadets are fighting a losing battle with sleep. They are united in their disgust and desire regarding a nap. Mrs. Strife points out that no one can see the far corner from any of the doors or outside the kitchen. They are on duty for the kitchen for 24 hours and as the authority regarding the kitchen she believes that they will be more efficient after a chance to regroup. She states this all as she bustles between counters, ovens, and fridges. Her skirts are swinging with her brisk pace. Her high-heeled, high-laced boots click out a no-nonsense critique. They can march twenty miles carrying full backpacks. She has hopelessly outpaced them. She isn’t looking at them as they pile into the corner. They fall asleep to the smell of bread baking. They are the first of her many converts.

At 10:30am she wakes them from the front of the kitchen to assemble sandwiches. The corner is small and the floor and walls cold. They wake up to find themselves closer than they’ll ever admit and are each privately grateful not to have been otherwise witnessed. The first batch of bread has cooled. The morning’s trays are back in place. There are more loaves baking and more bread rising. They work faster than before.

She slices the long loaves in quarters, slashes them open into hinged halves, flicks them into a pile that grows as she outpaces them. Faren folds them open and paints a stripe of strong mustard from the industrial-sized jar. Antoine stuffs in a small handful of the best of the vegetables, relatively fresh and still firm. Nicky plops on two scoops of the ubiquitous mystery meat, still the most common kitchen resource. Cloud carefully presses the sandwiches shut and piles them neatly in the serving pans. They finish just in time to scarf a sandwich each and line up to serve. The mystery meat is still mostly tasteless texture and salt. The sandwich manages to redeem it into a meal at least, but not the kind you pay for. The lines of cadets get to choose a scoop of apple or cherry pie filling, no pie, to complete their trays. Lunch, once highly anticipated, no matter how bad the food, becomes something to endure from the other side of it.

By 12:40pm, the line is gone except for stragglers. Mrs. Strife tells them to pull up chairs and start sorting beans to soak overnight. After lunch is more cleaning. Classes end at 5. Dinner starts at 7. They start tomorrow’s stew on the back stoves, peel yet more potatoes for a casserole of some sort for tomorrow’s lunch, and are shooed out to get their classroom assignments before the dinner rush.

They don’t notice that they are helping each other puzzle through the homework that assumes they sat through lectures they didn’t in a way that they wouldn’t have yesterday. They have too much to do in too little time. Dinner is a blur of ladling bowls and slapping bread slices to balance on but not overflow the stew. There is more cleaning. They are tired and invigorated and for the first time in a while, not hungry.

They return to the barracks after curfew, in the wee hours of the next morning, former enmity mostly forgotten. They return triumphant with very much not regular issue cookies, the product of a few supplies that were too good to not use but insufficient to create a large enough batch to cover the dinner crowd. By breakfast the incriminating delicious smell is gone from the kitchen. By breakfast, the crumbs are distant memories in E Barracks, but Nick, Faren, and Antoine are enjoying a greater camaraderie with their roommates.

*

Kitchen duty, once a threat, if a minor one, briefly becomes a source of escalating hilarious attempts to gauge how to misbehave enough to be punished but not enough to be punished with extra shifts, extra laps, or extra weight. It soon resolves itself into a rota between barracks as those supervising note how the boost in morale seems to inspire the current kitchen assignees to greater heights of endurance and creativity, to the detriment of other barracks’ placing in the endless competitions between them.

Anika Strife is no fool. She manages to parlay the cadets’ goodwill into reconnaissance on where under the plate to find certain spices or people-who-know-people, into a crowd-search of recipes that can be cooked for a crowd, into, finally, a creeping uptick in budget as management notes that better morale results in better results.

Slowly the improvements come limping in. She borrows tools and disassembles, cleans, oils, Lefty. Cloud is fascinated. She bargains with her slowly expanding network of suppliers and contacts and emerges triumphant with a shipment of slightly shriveled but entirely unmolded apples. She splurges her precious stash of cinnamon from Wutai and makes a cobbler. More than one tray is licked clean and the cafeteria, usually smelling of a mix of old food and stale sweat, briefly smells like a home.

*

Sometimes as she instructs her temporary workers, she says, “Food can be more than fuel.” She does not say, “ShinRa is foolish to pinch gil like a miser on his deathbed when they could buy your loyalty now with even the illusion of care”. The boys are mostly gangly and unfinished, well launched into the sprint to adulthood, but both closer and further then they know. They are always hungry and while ShinRa believes in its chemicals and technologies, still she knows that there are things that they cannot inject or can or reduce to pill form. These batches of boys and young men may always be less than they could have been. Then again, many came hungry to ShinRa and may have been no better off at home in a world where the old professions all seem to be withering and the only future is ShinRa.

Someday she hopes to cook real food. She dreams sometimes of teaching Cloud at least what he would need to forage and cook over a fire and live free of ShinRa’s encroaching hold over the world. Electricity is the djinn loose of the bottle, not evil, but also not without its price.

*

Two years later, when Professor Hojo dies, ShinRa does not make a public announcement. No one mourns him. More than a few wish they could spit on his grave, if he has one. Yet, he was an asset of the company, and so the Turks are sent to investigate.

A young Turk by the name of Tseng files a report concluding that the Professor died of natural causes, this despite the blunt trauma nature of his fatal head injury. At the upper level, this is accepted. Within the Turks, Veld lifts a brow and Tseng responds, “There were over two hundred people in the cafeteria, nine of them SOLDIERs, two of them Firsts. Every witness who saw or heard anything concurred; the professor reached for one Cloud Strife, age six, slipped on a wet spot in the kitchen, and fell. The kitchen staff will be re-taking the Safety in the Workplace course.”

Veld lowers his quirked brow. “It would be foolish of the professor to try to seize a chicobo in front of its mother, would it not? …It might even be considered entirely natural that such an action might provoke a natural response.”

Tseng has never heard his boss chuckle before. It is surprisingly warm and human.

*

In another few years, when Rufus Shinra is fostered among the Turks, he will find an iron skillet on the wall of Veld’s office. The skillet has a sizable dent warping most of the bottom and will never again make for efficient cooking. On the handle of the fry pan is a label in Reno’s horribly scribbly, almost flourished handwriting. He squints until he can decipher it: “The F*cking Frying Pan of Doom, Yo.”

**Author's Note:**

> With apologies, and admiration, to Patricia Wrede and her weapon of mass omlets.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Much Ado About Lt. Sephiroth](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10852194) by [Gothams_Only_Wolf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gothams_Only_Wolf/pseuds/Gothams_Only_Wolf)




End file.
